From Beautiful Mutants (1989), a nightmarish satire of Thatcher’s London, to The Unloved (1994), a murder mystery with a gruelling flashback to the Algerian war of independence, Deborah Levy’s early novels unfolded as fragmentary, perplexing torrents of images, populated by sexual deviants and damp with the blood of 20th-century conflicts, anti-naturalist but not reducible to allegory.
In the 2000s she published no novels; Levy was raising two children. But the market for fiction had changed by the time of her 2011 comeback, Swimming Home. That novel, which turned on an illicit encounter between a poet and his young fan at a French holiday villa, was less opaque than Levy’s previous work. However, the mainstream publishing houses deemed it too literary; it was left to the independent outfit And Other Stories, whereupon it was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. Ironically, thanks to that success, Levy has once again been embraced by an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Hot Milk, her latest novel, is concerned with hypochondria and a troubled mother-daughter relationship. At the level of the sentence, at least, it is her most straightforwardly readable book: you can be confident of knowing what’s happening in a way that wasn’t the case in her earlier work, which was written in defiance of “the slow, dulling imitation of real life”. But while she meets the reader halfway, an elusive quality remains.
The narrator is Sofia, a half-Greek anthropology graduate in her mid-20s who has given up a doctorate to care for her English mother Rose, whose paralysis has baffled various British doctors. Now Rose has remortgaged her Hackney home and Sofia has abandoned her below-minimum-wage job as a barista to spend a month together in arid Andalusia at a private physiotherapy clinic.
Adrift, Sofia compares her dormant doctoral thesis to “an unclaimed suicide”. She doesn’t speak Greek and hasn’t seen her father for 11 years, but keeps his surname; tellingly, Sofia says the “Papa-” prefix is the only part of her name anyone can pronounce. Both mother and daughter spend a lot of time observing each other without seeing. While Sofia has had to be attentive to Rose’s complaints from a young age, we sense that she hasn’t taken into account the sacrifices her mother made in raising her alone.
On the beach, Sofia is drawn to Ingrid from Berlin, whom she initially mistakes for a man after a lavatory cubicle mix-up. The shifting dynamics of this affair (complicated by Ingrid’s American boyfriend and her regular assignations with a riding instructor) are the most propulsive element in the multi-layered, dream-like narrative. Eurozone austerity (figured in unfinished apartment blocks and unemployment) anchors the action in the real world.
Events float by in short snatches, interspersed with creepy paragraphs from the point of view of someone who is spying on “the Greek girl”. At first we think the voice belongs to a philosophy graduate who helps Sofia with a jellyfish sting. Later – more troublingly - we think it might belong to someone she has never met. Whoever it is, they note that, at bedtime, Sofia doesn’t lock the door of the apartment she shares with Rose: “an invitation to hurt her very badly”.
These interludes are among several narrative teases; “Whatever you are waiting for may not arrive,” Sofia says at one point. While Rose calls her daughter “plump and idle and… living off her mother at quite an advanced age”, Sofia, by her own account, is “anti the major plots”: she doesn’t want to be someone’s girlfriend and rejects any prospect of motherhood: “I was flesh thirst desire dust blood lips cracking feet blistered knees skinned hips bruised, but I was so happy not to be napping on a sofa under a blanket with… a baby on my lap.”
There’s an ironic twist to make any hypochondriac shudder, as well as a disturbing late revelation about childhood innocence. But ultimately Hot Milk, like most of Levy’s fiction, is about its uncanny atmosphere. Ingrid takes an axe to a snake on her bathroom floor after a post-coital cold shower with Sofia; she gives Sofia a halterneck top embroidered with the word “beloved”, only for Sofia to see that it actually reads “beheaded”. Once, Sofia deposits Rose’s wheelchair in front of an oncoming lorry.
These bizarre images imprint themselves long after the end of this feverish coming-of-age novel, which confirms the resurgence of its singular author.
Review by Anthony Cummins